What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

Post by temp8888 » Fri, Jul 01, 2022, 11:54 AM UTC

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #645

ayjchan wrote: post #531

This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. I’m going to answer some of the questions that have come up in the comments. 1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book? Yes, the updated paperback comes out in the US next week: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalin... The updated epilogue now discusses three significant new developments since the publication…

Hey Alina, thank you for doing the work that some others are seemingly afraid to touch! There are many fair-weather scientists, but researchers who consider all credible leads and data, no matter the popularity or political implications of the results, are much rarer. I have two questions: 1. There were genome sequences removed from the 'Sequence Read Archive', at the request of Chinese scientists.¹ It was later port…

> At the time I didn't think much of it, but then 2 or 3 days later they first deleted that ad, then the whole board and when I visited today I found their entire website has been completely reworked. Have you seen this and do you know if it was saved anywhere?

https://web.archive.org/web/20200615000000*/http://www.whiov...

Post by tripletao » Sun, Jul 03, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

SkittyDog wrote: post #789

jiggawatts wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of logic seems sane until you stop and think about it for a while. First off -- and this should be enough by itself -- the research the Wuhan lab did hasn't appeared to have helped in a material way to fight the COVID pandemic. So they gambled, lost, and there is nothing to show for it . But that's not the insane bit. The truly insane bit is that over 20 million people died for this little "experiment" of t…

> First off -- and this should be enough by itself -- the research the Wuhan lab did hasn't appeared to have helped in a material way to fight the COVID pandemic. So they gambled, lost, and there is nothing to show for it. You can't possibly claim that without being a qualified expert in the field. I'm not, but I have asked friends who are--and they're quite firm that this type of experimental research (1) did help s…

Advocates of such high-risk research have reached to find some minor alleged benefits in this pandemic, like in:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x

But if you look at the actual examples they provide, they're incredibly weak. Remdesivir wasn't discovered due to GoF research, and wasn't tested in humans solely due to any result from GoF research; but GoF research did provide some of the early evidence that prompted the first human trials. Unfortunately remdesivir also shows little evidence of efficacy in humans:

https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-recommends-against-use-of-g...

They also cite minor contributions to some novel vaccine candidates that as far as I can tell haven't progressed to humans. And these examples are from Ralph Baric's lab; while he may have been reckless, his research was less controversial than the WIV's, working at higher BSL and with fewer novel pathogens. The WIV took significantly greater risks, and so far has literally zero practical benefit to show for it.

Virology in aggregate has clearly provided a benefit to humanity, in this pandemic and elsewhere. That's not the question, though. The deliberate search for enhanced potential human pandemic pathogens--including both laboratory gain-of-function on such pathogens, and sampling missions to remote sites to find new natural pathogens in areas that no other humans routinely visited, and thus that presented no obvious risk of natural spillover--is a tiny subset of virology.

We could ban that tiny subset, and we'd still have all our same vaccines, same anti-viral drugs, same tests, etc. If anyone tells you otherwise, then ask them for the evidence.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?